Winifred Robinson: MPs are going to investigate
comparison websites, the ones that offer to help you switch your
energy supplier. It's a market that's dominated by a few big
companies and they run big advertising campaigns on the telly,
including uSwitch, Money Supermarket, Go Compare and Confused.com.
They've been accused recently of hiding the best deals from their
customers.

Tim Yeo MP chairs the Energy and Climate Change committee and
it's going to lead this investigation. Tim Yeo welcome to You and
Yours, what is your main worry here?

Tim Yeo: Our worry is that we've received
extremely serious reports that consumers who are using these sites
in order to try and find a better tariff for electricity or gas or
combined are not being told that the sites themselves are earning
commission from the switches that may result. And even more
seriously than that, although that's pretty serious in our view,
that they may not always be showing all the best deals, these sites
may show to consumers who access them only those new tariffs on
which they would earn a commission.

Winifred Robinson: Well that was certainly the
accusation at a certain point in time, but a number of these
websites claim that has now been put right, made more
straightforward. So who will you be calling to give evidence?

Tim Yeo: We shall be calling the sites themselves, my committee
adopts a very much evidence based approach, so we haven't any idea
what our conclusions from this inquiry will be, but we do think the
evidence we have received so far is sufficiently serious to justify
oral evidence being taken as well as written evidence which we've
called for last week. Oral evidence is being taken directly from
the sites and if they have changed their practices they can tell us
about that, it may well be that they decide to change them in
advance of coming to meet us, that's happened in the past, we had
considerable success when we found energy companies doing doorstep
selling to consumers and perhaps misleading consumers then, that
practice stopped pretty soon after we started to investigate it. So
hopefully the mere announcement of the inquiry will improve
practice.

Winifred Robinson: The regulator Ofgem has said
that these sites must be transparent about the fact that they are
earning a commission, but doesn't compel them to reveal how much
they are making, on the basis that would undermine some of the
business models and that without these companies the public would
be the poorer. Do you think that's fair?

Tim Yeo: No I don't, I think that's important
that there should be complete transparency. We have at the moment a
situation where there's really is no trust from consumers in
dealing with energy companies and if we find that the comparison
sites, which have represented themselves as being neutral,
objective advisers to consumers, if we find they're earning varying
amounts of commission I think it's absolutely essential that all
those sites should disclose, to people who use them, exactly how
much commission they earn from any particular transaction.

Winifred Robinson: We're constantly told the
best way to save money on energy bills is to switch, but only a
third of people have ever done it. What do you think is stopping
us?

Tim Yeo: I think the processes are rather a
confusing one for many people and therefore they're rather daunted
about embarking on it. I think until very recently the number of
tariffs available was so large it was actually quite confusing for
people sometimes, the energy companies are trying to simplify that
a bit, which is good. But we believe that it is important people
should switch, they should have the opportunity to do so, it should
be encouraged to do so, the existence of switching as a facility
does itself impose competition on energy suppliers, that's a good
thing, but if we have a situation now where people start to lose
trust in these sites because of a lack of transparency in their
operations that would damage the whole process and be bad for the
market and bad for consumers.